Re: Do you have a Knowledge Officer?

In article <5moi6gFej77mU1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Pete Dashwood <dashwood@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

[snip]

Or it could be that it didn't get done because you were breathing down their
necks demanding test plans, "communication meetings" and "status updates"
every five minutes, and bullying them to show what a macho Boss you are

Hmmmm... I've been running into a bit of that lately; I'm on a horrid
three-part team consisting of company employees, 'stable' consultants
(folks from a small consulting house looking to expand themselves into the
next Andersen... errrrr, Accenture or the like) and independent
consultants... that is, me.

At 9:30 the other morning I got a list of maybe fifty, sixty Oracle
database column_names and was asked to relate these, by hand, to the
COBOL-like field names in the documentation for the half-dozen input
datasets, eg ANN_SAL_OVRTM_AMT is Dataset P8638Y2, OVERTIME-EARNINGS-YTD,
startpos 866, len 4, PD/COMP-3. I managed my way through this and then
began to construct DFSORT control statements to create temp datasets from
the full ones, merge/SPLICE them together and wind up with something that
could be used to load the database.

So... fifty, sixty fields, half-a-dozen formats, variations in names,
check for multiple occurrences of the same data in different datasets...
the usual scut-work. Two and a half hours later I get an email 'we need
to meet on this'; I assemble my notes, make a few photocopies and into the
conference-room we go.

The woman who called/leads the meeting is from the consulting-stable...
and they seem to be looking to get more work from the client in the Old
Fashioned Way of calling meetings, pointing fingers and generating
paperwork. She asks what I've done; I pass over a copy of my notes and
begin explaining... and she cuts me off with 'this will be helpful, do you
have a copy of it in a word-processing document I can work with?'

I smiled and said 'This is what I have been able to do in the two and
small change hours since I first laid eyes on this; at that time I
expected the work to be my notes and not of a caliber immediately grasped
by any other person at any other time. I can continue coding things up so
that you'll have your load-file by close of business today...

.... or I can stop doing that and turn to prettying up my working-notes so
that they can be included in a lovely presentation to be sent off to the
corner office... in fact, if you give me another *three* hours I can
probably set them to music. What do you want, the file or a Happy Song?'

And now... and now she no longer invites me to meetings, I have to spend
my time writing code. It may even be that she thinks this exclusion is a
punishment to me.

DD
.

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